The increase in the ownership and usage of smart phones presents a paradigm shift in how we view our web interactions with survey participants. Not surprisingly, most studies using email-invitations have a subset of respondents who attempt to take surveys using their mobile phone’s web browser.
Form factors and technology related to mobile phones can make survey participation challenging. Maritz Research recently completed a research on research study addressing his topic. The goal was to identify the best way to present scales (horizontal versus vertical) and grids (standard multi-attribute grids versus grids broken into multiple scaled questions with one attribute per page). Outcomes were measured by respondent engagement, satisfaction and data quality. The study also analyzed score differences and demographic differences between PC and mobile web respondents, enabling us to determine whether the bias in ratings we have seen in other studies (taken on both mobile phones and PCs) is attributable to true mode differences or possibly interpersonal differences between the types of respondents who choose to use one device versus another. Finally, we analyzed whether data collected on mobile phones, where the possibility of distraction seems greater, is worse than data collected on PCs.